BACKGROUND Attention to global health security governance is more important now than ever before. Scientists predict that a possible influenza pandemic could affect 1.5 billion people, cause up to 150 million deaths and leave US$3 trillion in economic damages. A public health emergency in one country is now only hours away from affecting many others. METHODS Using regime analysis from politic...

Ilona Kickbusch's thought provoking editorial is criticized in this commentary, partly because she fails to refer to previous critical work on the global conditions and policies that sustain inequality, poverty, poor health and damage to the biosphere and, as a result, she misreads global power and elides consideration of the fundamental historical structures of political and material power tha...

Abstract This article opens up the blackbox through which evidence is selected and assessed in making of guidelines recommendations global governance, an exploration “methods regimes.” Methods regimes are a special kind sociomaterial arrangement, govern production validation knowledge, by establishing clear hierachy between alternative forms research designs. When such become inscribed processe...

BACKGROUND In successfully negotiating the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the World Health Organization (WHO) has led a significant innovation in global health governance, helping to transform international tobacco control. This article provides the first comprehensive review of the diverse campaign initiated by transnational tobacco corporations (TTCs) to try to undermine the ...

The Lancet-University of Oslo Commission on Global Governance for health correctly concluded that: 'with globalization, health inequity increasingly results from transnational activities that involve actors with different interests and degrees of power'. At the same time, taking up that Commission's focus on political determinants of health and 'power asymmetries' requires recognizing the inter...

Correspondence to Professor Richard Smith; [email protected] INTRODUCTION In 1948, my (RS) grandfather bought a car; a Morris Minor. It was slow, cramped and unreliable. Yet, as his needs changed over the years, he did not buy another car because ‘it was too difficult’ to decide. Today, he does not own a car. He can use community transport, Uber drivers and car sharing schemes. Transpor...

New contours of global inequality present new challenges for global health, and require that we consider new kinds of health issues as global. I provide a number of illustrations, arguing the need for a political science of health that goes beyond conventional preoccupations with formal institutional and interstate interactions and takes into account how globalization has affected the health po...